Discussion Forum Rules for PublicAgenda.org
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Comments
In wake of federal legislation that allows states the option of extending foster care to age 21 and federally funded kinship care, CA introduced AB 12 Fostering Connections to Success Act to take advantage of both federal reimbursements. All publicity regarding AB 12 has highlighted how this piece of legislation will have a significant impact on transition age foster youth. However, when taking a close look at the legislation, I discovered that the act also proposes funding for homeless youth and families. How do people feel about this? Should legislation introduced on behalf of foster youth, be only for foster youth, or should homeless families and youth have a stake as well?
A common reason given to change our health care system is it growing costs. If the costs shown in your chart at http://www.publicagenda.org/citizen/issueguides/health-care is accurate, it appears costs have not risen significantly since 1990. Please clarify the argument that costs are rising.
Terry Kay
Dear Public Agenda people:
Several years ago, when I was beginning research on my book, Just Plain Data Analysis, I wrote to someone at Public Agenda to congratulate them on the quality of charts in their issue guides.
Since then I have noticed a substantial deterioration in the quality of your data display.
One of the basic rules of good charting is "Show the data!"
For example, several of your time series charts use a 0-100% scale that completely hides any meaningful variation:
Compare this (which is good):
http://www.publicagenda.org/files/charts/ff_fedbudget_deficit_surplus_ec...
to this, with its terrible 0-100% scale:
http://www.publicagenda.org/files/charts/ff_fedbudget_international_spen...
As a general rule, pie charts are a bad idea. This chart is one of the worst pie charts on your site:
http://www.publicagenda.org/files/charts/ff_fedbudget_expenditures.png
A rotated bar chart would display these data nicely.
A second fundamental rule of data display is to sort the data by the most important variable. The alphabet is seldom the most important variable. As you see here:
http://www.publicagenda.org/files/charts/ff_poverty_change%20in%20TANF%2...
My own website, http://lilt.ilstu.edu/jpda/charts/Charts.htm addresses these and other data display principles.
In general, I greatly appreciate the public agenda website and use it often in my public policy courses, but, please, do something about your charts and tables.
Sincerely,
Gary M. Klass
Associate Professor
Department of Politics and Government
Illinois State University
Normal, Illinois 61790
(309)438-7852
This does not seem to be a good place to post my message, I will try elsewhere on your site
If there is a rule that says that comments must be on-topic, lest they be removed, then why are there obvious examples of off-topic comments (right here in this very forum) that flaunt that rule? Why have they not been removed?
Here is the rule cited by Public Agenda:
>Focus. We know how conversations can meander, but we ask that you stay on topic in the discussions.
>Off-topic posts may be moved or deleted without notice if we believe they’re interfering with the discussion.
Based on this example of forum moderation (or lack thereof), along with the low level of activity throughout the forum over the time (2 years) that it was created, I suggest that this experiment be completed along with a "lessons to be learned" exercise.
I suggest that one such "lesson to be learned" is that engaging people online is more than just putiing up a web-forum, so you need to get help from the outside. Ironicallty, you need to engage outside help in order to better figure out how to engage people (in general).
If anyone at Public Agenda does read this, then please contact me as I do have many years of experience (since 1990) in the area of online engagement, and would like to help you, so I am using this as a test to see if I am just yelling down an empty well.
vr,
Stephen Buckley
sbuckley -at- UStransparency.com
http://www.UStransparency.com
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